More than 50% of sellers on Amazon are from tier II and below cities

February 20, 2019.

Small and medium businesses on Amazon.in are seeing tremendous growth opportunities on the back of various initiatives undertaken by the company since its India launch in 2013. Amazon.in started operations in India over 5 years back, with few hundred sellers and the company now has more than 4, 00,000 sellers; a huge chunk of which comprises of small and medium businesses. Interestingly, over 50% of Amazon sellers are from Tier II and below cities from places like Aligarh, Idukki, Anugul in and Rajpipla to name a few.

Amazon launched in India at a
time when awareness about digital commerce and online selling was very limited.In
line with its vision to transform the way India sells, Amazon strongly believes
in working backwards from seller needs and innovating on behalf of its sellers,
enabling them to successfully run
their online business.The company continues to innovate, including some
unique initiatives, tailored specifically for India, supporting sellers across
their selling lifecycle and make selling online synonymous with selling
anywhere in India.

Amazon.in started with two initiatives in India – Amazon Chai Cart and Amazon Tatkal. The company started with a one of its kind program- Chai Cart, a unique way of educating SMBs in India on online selling opportunityover a cup of tea or coffee.Owing to the phenomenal success of Chai Cart, Amazon.in expanded the program to launch Amazon Tatkal- a specially designed studio-on-wheels as a one-stop-shop to help SMBs get online and sell on Amazon.in in less than 60 minutes! As part of this initiative, Amazon travelled over 50,000 kilometers covering over 150 cities across India, on-boardeding thousands of sellers.

For a country with mobile phone
as their first screen, Amazon Seller Mobile
App is another innovation that enables seamless registration to launch,
order notification, and order detailing, shipment confirmation and order
fulfilment notification services to sellers through mobile devices. Over 60% of
sellers on Amazon.in currently use the seller app to manage their business.

Amazon also launched the ‘Kala Haat’ and Amazon Saheli program to empower small businesses,women
entrepreneurs, micro entrepreneurs like weavers, artisans, and craftsmen to
benefit from e-commerce and sell their products on the Amazon.in marketplace.Through
these programs alone, Amazon has reached over 750,000 weaver and artisan
households and 100,000 women entrepreneurs respectively.

With its flagship initiatives
like Seller University that trains
and nurture sellers, Service Provider
Network, a pool of third party vendors to support sellers in their online
journey and logistic support through programs such as Easy Ship, Amazon.in has rolled out several such initiatives and
has been working extensively to meet different business requirements of Indian sellers
and small entrepreneurs and help them grow their business profitably online. Amazon
has also extended its support service that was offered in Hindi and English to
also include regional language support services for sellers in three more
Indian languages – Kannada, Tamil and Telugu.